Unreal Engine 4 will bring us beautiful games faster than ever

UE4 stands to conquer all, as long as consoles don't get in the way.

A select group of people got a private demo of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 at the Game Developers Conference in March, and Stu Horvath of Ars Technica's sister publication Wired was one of the lucky few. UE4 has many new features that will let it continue to sit on the Throne of Games (Engines), though Wired hints that old console hardware may hinder its crack at progress.

One of the distinct properties of UE4 is its ability to create and display effects based on the inherent properties of an environment, rather than displaying pre-programmed ones based on anticipated scenarios. For example, light that travels through water would refract, and a character that stands in a mirror would see a reflection of themselves, not a pre-programmed image or pre-rendered character standing on the other side. This natural behavior presumably creates much less work for developers—rather than having to explicitly teach everything how to react to every individual stimulus, objects have inherent behaviors and know what to do.

Another one of UE4's desirable new features is its particle effects, or the ability to render hordes of tiny objects and all of their erratic motions. In the demo shown at GDC, onlookers saw the engine's ability to render many pieces of ash floating in the air, and dust particles floating in the light of a flashlight in a dark room. Normally, having to render the odd and easily affected paths of particles brings processors to their knees, but with UE4 running on an NVIDIA Kepler GTX 680, they drifted without effort.

Developers will also see a lot to like in UE4. Wired notes that the new engine lets devs see some of the more minor visual changes in the game implemented instantly, without the usual hours of rendering time needed. UE4 also adds a new version of the engine's scripting tool, called Kismet 2. Kismet the first, used in UE3, was notable for its visual interface that let level designers drop in elements and relate the actions of objects to one another from a palette instead of using lines of code (for instance, telling the game that the reaction of a door to a character bumping into it should be "swing open"). Kismet 2 is the same sort of object-based flowchart, but the processes it controls can be set into place immediately and used right away, making the tool more effortless to use.

While Horvath couldn't say enough about the beauty of the UE4 demo, there is a faint shadow on its horizon: consoles. Epic Games is in constant contact with companies that make consoles, and is pushing for them to make the devices as powerful as possible in order to support the many wonders of UE4. The seven-year-old Xbox 360 and the six-year-old PlayStation 3 are now easily outstripped by PCs in terms of performance; Epic Games wants to make sure that the next generation brings the console side up to speed.

Part of Epic Games' case for UE4 is not only better games, but highly streamlined development. With tools like Kismet 2 and the lack of rendering needed for minor changes, huge and impressive blockbuster games will take less time to accomplish the usual feats, and could conceivably relieve development studios of some financial and time pressure.

UE4 has no concrete launch date set, but its demo will be revealed to the public in June.

97 Reader Comments

I'm as big a fan as you can find of not obseleting hardware too soon. It sucks to buy a console, and 2 or 3 years later, a new console comes out, and nobody makes any more games for the old console. However, it does strike me that we are about due for a console generation refresh, at this point. XBox360 and PS3 have been around for quite awhile now.

but hey, at least everything looks like it's made from hard plastic or clay. that's a win right? UE3 was pants. i sure hope if every game on earth is going to use UE4 it at least looks a little more, real maybe?

Epic Games is in constant contact with companies that make consoles and are pushing for them to make the devices as powerful as possible, in order to support the many wonders of UE4.

Yay, that way we can look forward to another 140 cookie-cutter POS games, plus the occasional gem here and there. And all of them will have that horrible visual signature that the Unreal Engine gives to all its games, so that you can spot a UE4 engine game from 20 feet away.

What I want console makers to focus on is not selling $400 or $300 consoles. I want $250 or less at launch. And not for gimped versions. I don't give a damn if PCs can run circles around consoles. The graphics on consoles are good enough for me at this point; I want game developers to stop spending so damn much money on graphics and spend it on more interesting games and game ideas.

Hey, Epic: the so-called PC-gaming Renaissance ain't fueled by superior rendering on PCs. It's fueled by an open platform with easily accessible development tools. Which, despite your UDK, you don't have much to do with.

Cool. Now they need to remake the original Unreal with this engine. Tweak the original levels to make them more appealing... more details etc... but keep the basic game the same. There are hoards of gamers alive today that have not been around in 1998 and have never seen the awesomes that was Unreal.

Sorry for being out of touch on the next generation of consoles, but when are people expecting them to be out? End of 2013? Later? Whew, back when the last batch came out, Caesar and Hannibal were still dissecting novel processor architectures. I hope we'll get the same treatment when more news comes out.

If it truly takes a GTX680 to make UE4 shine, they may be in for trouble. The rumored specs of the next Xbox at least are far below that.

On the contrary, my dear fellow. Even if consoles do come in under the current "jaw-dropping, epically awesome scene of gpu frying" level, so long as UE4 can flexibly adjust to the new consoles, that's a big step up for developers. Remember, if UE4 works well with consoles, developers get access to a new engine that, out of the box, works with the new consoles AND has improved workflow over what they have now.

And if new consoles just can't match the equivalent of the GTX680? No biggie, developers are old hands at handling that by now. They've been having to limit console games for some time now, by holding back texture quality, reducing FOV, etc. Developers know how to scrounge on consoles for power, simply because they've been forced to.

I'd rather have the engine that can handle the consoles AND grow to still be a powerhouse five years down the road. If I'm on PC, and it takes me three years to make a game, I want to start with the most powerful engine I can find, because I want it to be targetting the mid -high teir three years from now, with options to scale down to low teir. These same scalings are what these engines run on their console brethren.

If it truly takes a GTX680 to make UE4 shine, they may be in for trouble. The rumored specs of the next Xbox at least are far below that.

Being demoed on a GTX680 is not the same thing as requiring a GTX680. Also, by the time a new PS or Xbox ships the 680 will be old hat. We'll at lest see the GeForce 7 line and ATi/AMD HD8 series. Don't forget that the rumored Xbox720 specs are just that, rumors.

And...no more super-bloom lighting, shiny plastic people or slimy looking environments. It looks like shite.

Jesus Christ, yes! How did I rant about UE3 and not mention it's waxy, plastic-y, over-bloom crap graphics? UE3 was probably single-handedly behind the over-bloom epidemic of modern graphics that has ruined the visuals of so many games these days. With any luck, UE4 can help undo some of the damage it caused.

I either want to play a game that is too complex for a console, or a simpler game played on my iPad

If I want to play with four other people I certainly do NOt want my screen divided into four segments when I have the option of everyone just pulling out their iPads and playing one of the new Bluetooth enabled games on the iPad. I see only massive growth in this sort of gameplay.

On the other hand, if I want to play a visually stunning game I'll buy it on PC.

Consoles were great when they could offer about the same gameplay experience as a low end PC, but that time is quickly vanishing as the market surges ahead of the console hardware I find myself using my old PS3 for bluray movies and Netflix and gaming on my pimped out desktop or my iPad.

It looks as good as the pre-renders from most games I've played recently. That's the hard thing to come to terms with, this is being rendered on the fly, actual gameplay stuff. And it's meant to be a technical demo mostly based around particles and light (which kind of fail in a frozen frame).

It really doesn't look like much of an improvement over UE3. It's not all about graphics horsepower either. If you look at what Valve did with Half-Life 2 it was the character animations, lip-sync and physics that really stood out. The original Unreal engine was innovative for the time and Unreal Tournament did a lot - especially with the introduction of texture compression - yet now we really don't see that cutting edge progression. Games like Mirror's Edge have pushed unique art styles that were very compelling but since the focus has moved to consoles there really hasn't been much to see. Afterall, the X360 and PS3 were lagging behind PCs quicker than any previous console generation and now they're beyond dated. A lot of the top titles struggle to achieve 1280x720 and the graphical fidelity (textures, polygon count, etc) suffers as well.

DICE managed to show with Battlefield 3 that you can produce a mutli-platform title with excellent enhancements for PC. Epic needs to do follow suit and motivate developers to do the same. Afterall, if the developers fail to make the most out of the engine then it reflects poorly on the technology. UE3 looks very dated now and UE4 is going to need to do a lot to turn things around. However, the hardware rumoured to be in the upcoming consoles doesn't sound at all exciting - it's likely that PCs will be offering clearly superior performance from the off.

Really? Even Crysis 2 with the high resolution texture package and DX11 upgrade and Witcher 2 don't have the fidelity seen in the first screenshot for the UE4 tech demo (and the two games I mentioned are flat out gorgeous). And Crysis 2 is damned beautiful. I imagine the only engine which will offer graphical parity will be CryEngine 3 unless iD can just knock us out of the park with a few updates to iD Tech. I'm not sure Frostbit 2 will be used in enough games for that engine to matter to anyone but Battlefield fans. Parity in terms of easing game development, who knows.

If it truly takes a GTX680 to make UE4 shine, they may be in for trouble. The rumored specs of the next Xbox at least are far below that.

On the contrary, my dear fellow. Even if consoles do come in under the current "jaw-dropping, epically awesome scene of gpu frying" level, so long as UE4 can flexibly adjust to the new consoles, that's a big step up for developers. Remember, if UE4 works well with consoles, developers get access to a new engine that, out of the box, works with the new consoles AND has improved workflow over what they have now.

And if new consoles just can't match the equivalent of the GTX680? No biggie, developers are old hands at handling that by now. They've been having to limit console games for some time now, by holding back texture quality, reducing FOV, etc. Developers know how to scrounge on consoles for power, simply because they've been forced to.

I'd rather have the engine that can handle the consoles AND grow to still be a powerhouse five years down the road. If I'm on PC, and it takes me three years to make a game, I want to start with the most powerful engine I can find, because I want it to be targetting the mid -high teir three years from now, with options to scale down to low teir. These same scalings are what these engines run on their console brethren.

The "easy" way to handle outdated tech is to build in a "UE3 Mode" that forces the engine to do things the old way for hardware that can't handle the engine's new way of doing things. Yes that's much harder on Epic (at the worst forces them to handle and maintain two separate, yet conjoined, codebases) but it would allow developers to use UE4 across the breadth of devices that support UE3 and the newer hardware with as little extra effort as possible. Think of it like those engines that support DX9, DX10 and DX11. The gamer gets to choose their poison based on performance requirements, hardware capabilities and desire for Teh Pretty.

The other option (and truly the easy way) is to simply maintain licensing for UE3, but if the new consoles can't run UE4 based games why would developers (other than Epic) choose to use UE4 at all?

The other limitations will still be around (model complexity, lower resolution textures, etc) if for no other reason than over the lifespan of a console the capacity for games to have more polygons, post-processing effects or increased textures rises; while the console capabilities remain fixed. Still boggles my mind that so few developers decide to give their high-resolution assets to the PC gaming crowd that want (and can use) them. I hate to go back to the days of Low/Medium/High resolution texture options but we may have to do exactly that. If for no other reason than to allow the PC games that come out to look as good as they possibly can.

Do people not get what's being shown? The whole point of this tech demo was to show off things like particle effects and lighting - things automated by the engine to help reduce development time for studios. Particle effects are especially useless to show off in still images. This wasn't about masturbatory screenshots like the old Crysis versus real life stuff. It was about showing developers how UE4 would both aid in reducing development overhead and up critical areas for eye candy like particle effects and non-canned animations based upon effects.

From the article One of the distinct properties of UE4 is its ability to create and display effects based on the inherent properties of an environment, rather than displaying pre-programmed ones based on anticipated scenarios. For example, light that travels through water would refract, and a character that stands in a mirror would see a reflection of themselves, not a pre-programmed image or pre-rendered character standing on the other side. This natural behavior presumably creates much less work for developers—rather than having to explicitly teach everything how to react to every individual stimulus, objects have inherent behaviors and know what to do.

What I want console makers to focus on is not selling $400 or $300 consoles. I want $250 or less at launch. And not for gimped versions. I don't give a damn if PCs can run circles around consoles. The graphics on consoles are good enough for me at this point; I want game developers to stop spending so damn much money on graphics and spend it on more interesting games and game ideas.

The cynic in me suggests that as long as it's easier to show off better graphics with a screenshot than it is to show off better gameplay, the money will always get spent on the graphics.

Do people not get what's being shown? The whole point of this tech demo was to show off things like particle effects and lighting - things automated by the engine to help reduce development time for studios. Particle effects are especially useless to show off in still images. This wasn't about masturbatory screenshots like the old Crysis versus real life stuff. It was about showing developers how UE4 would both aid in reducing development overhead and up critical areas for eye candy like particle effects and non-canned animations based upon effects.

From the article One of the distinct properties of UE4 is its ability to create and display effects based on the inherent properties of an environment, rather than displaying pre-programmed ones based on anticipated scenarios. For example, light that travels through water would refract, and a character that stands in a mirror would see a reflection of themselves, not a pre-programmed image or pre-rendered character standing on the other side. This natural behavior presumably creates much less work for developers—rather than having to explicitly teach everything how to react to every individual stimulus, objects have inherent behaviors and know what to do.

It looks like shit. Sorry, but it does. It sounds cool, and I'm sure it'll look cool, but if the only evidence of said coolness is a batch of shitty pics.. well, eloquent textual descriptions is just fine, TYVM.

Sorry for being out of touch on the next generation of consoles, but when are people expecting them to be out? End of 2013? Later? Whew, back when the last batch came out, Caesar and Hannibal were still dissecting novel processor architectures. I hope we'll get the same treatment when more news comes out.

With the economy in the shitter, they probably don't want to risk the losses that may be incurred with slick new hardware. I'm guess maybe in a couple years we'll see some new consoles, but with less top of the line kit and more in a price range us poor people can handle.

I guess I do care. Somewhat. Er, not that much anymore. Stuff looks good enough now.

What I really want is much better AI. You know, enemies that are somewhat self-aware and react to what I do. What if they were smart enough to dig in, use covering fire, and try to flank me. What if my AI controlled buddies were also smart enough to dig in, use covering fire, and worm their way up the flank. What if they could at least find their way to the other side of an obstacle without getting hung up on the path finding or taking the most idiotic exposed route.

Cool. Now they need to remake the original Unreal with this engine. Tweak the original levels to make them more appealing... more details etc... but keep the basic game the same. There are hoards of gamers alive today that have not been around in 1998 and have never seen the awesomes that was Unreal.

Please.

Seems every thread on every site about the Unreal engine has at least one comment like this lately. Hopefully Epic has noticed the same!

I love how there are so many people complaining about how crappy it looks. These are LOW-RES JPEG COMPRESSED STATIC IMAGES of a DEMO. I'm guessing it's going to look a lot more impressive shown real time at 2560 res.

I love how there are so many people complaining about how crappy it looks. These are LOW-RES JPEG COMPRESSED STATIC IMAGES of a DEMO. I'm guessing it's going to look a lot more impressive shown real time at 2560 res.

"LOW-RES JPEG COMPRESSED STATIC IMAGES" of good graphics don't look like bad. You can take screenshots of other games and they'll still look good, better than this tripe. So I'm not buying this non-argument about being .jpgs for why this looks like crap.

It still retains the same UE3 plastic-y bump mapped look. If they're hoping to impress people, they failed.